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I'm starting to wonder just what the hell kind of place *The Witch from Mercury* is in this season.

Yes, I see it. Technically top 10 in karma and likely faring far better for being in a Sunday slot than most despite being the day where big new anime announcements get posted. I estimate that it's averaging about 400k on YouTube (combined GundamInfo and Ani-One views), trends big in Japan and is getting traction among Western anitwt, but has barely moved the needle on MAL and despite being Top 10 isn't raking nearly as much as I once thought (this may change come Christmas and New Year).

Now, we're going every other week with this thanks to local broadcast scheduling.

This is a strange show to track in terms of reception, to be sure, and I've already talked at some length about all sorts of things about G-Witch to try and make sense of it in a season this loaded with banger after banger and gems that you only need to sit through in an hour or two to decide for. From trying to see if being "Gundam" is as much a curse as it is a blessing (heh) to production woes to even just how puzzling the plotting is, I feel like I've already exhausted the things I can talk about and am only scrambling for Occam's razor: the simple explanation is that G-Witch is great, but not great enough to really get it up there, which it has enough believers but not to a point where it can keep up.

Which, I suppose, is what I should've expected. Look deep enough into my comment history and you'll realize that despite all my short-selling I actually am a fan of most things Gundam. But don't be surprised -- as I've said before, I'll never stop being gobsmacked that G-Witch is rating well at all, much less at the levels I projected weeks ago. Maybe it shouldn't be that shocking, but I still feel an odd paradox while watching. Every episode I come away thinking "wow, what a ride -- but look how cute and badass these two are throughout all that!" along with a new set of questions and answers. Every other frame drives tons of interaction and every single word gets analyzed to infer something. To this day, it's still the most-commented anime original. For all intents and purposes, G-Witch has done its job splendidly, yet I still find it wild that it's even here at all.

All this leads me to my biggest question: if you take away any financial or marketing incentive, why does Gundam as a franchise persist in this decade? How come it can still adapt, knowing full well the weight of its name, to an era that has almost-but-not-quite moved on from using giant robots as allegories and metaphors? Why is Bandai still betting on its relevance?

I'm not gonna answer it here cuz I'm pretty sure those answers have already been made way before me, so it's a matter of research (and I need help with that for a post-cour ender I wanna make). But it's aso clear that if Bandai wants to keep Gundam;s place in the crowd, it has to do better. Part of that better had been done last year, and Hathaway's Flash is the best bone UC fans will get. SEED is a ways away, so G-Witch is the current holder for the franchise's hopes and dreams. And I say they're succeeding, even when just as many people bet against it as there are people cheering for it.